This video / recipe was recently shared in !food@beehaw.org, and I thought it would be easy to make and extend my meals without having to go to the grocery store.

I tried out the recipe today using TVP as the meat substitute, and made some cornbread to go with it:

here's the recipe from the video description:

Ingredients:

  • 1 lb pinto beans, soaked
  • ½ pack MyBacon (mycelium bacon), diced
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 4–5 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 Tablespoons oil
  • 2 tsp smoked paprika
  • 2 tsp granulated garlic
  • 2 tsp granulated onion
  • 2 Bay Leaves
  • 2 tsp No-Chicken Better Than Bouillon
  • 8–10 cups water (for a brothy first day)
  • Salt and black pepper to taste

Optional “pork” substitutes:

  • Light Life tempeh bacon (diced),
  • ½ block tofu (smoked tofu works great),
  • soy curls (rehydrated, chopped, and roasted ahead).

Method

  1. Soak Beans with boiling water for 1 – 2 hours.
  2. Prep onions
  3. Drain and rinse beans

In a separate pan, render the diced MyBacon until lightly crisp with added oil. Add onion and cook until softened, then stir in the garlic.

Add seasonings and cook briefly. Add the beans and bring to a slow boil, then simmer for 1 -2 hours until beans are tender. Stirring frequently. Season with salt and black pepper. -Brothy the first day, thickens naturally the next.

Top with nutritional yeast 🔥

Ingredients I used and approximate cost:

  • 200 g (~1 cup?) dry pinto beans, ~$0.75 (estimate based on what I paid for kidney beans; these were some beans I’ve stored in my pantry for a while, I don’t know what price I paid)
  • 157 g (2 small) onions, normally ~$0.55 for this amount, but I found a deal and actually paid $0.07
  • 25 g canola oil (I don’t have cost estimate for this, but oil is expensive)
  • 13 g garlic, ~$0.14
  • 79 g (~1 scant cup) dry TVP, (I don’t have cost estimate for this, but TVP is usually fairly cheap)

I would guess it’s less than $5 for the whole pot.

I don’t bother to measure lots of ingredients, so I don’t have a cost estimate for other things I threw in there to help it out:

  • spices (like paprika)
  • miso
  • better-than-bouillon
  • soy sauce
  • mushroom seasoning powder
  • MSG

It sorta tastes like it needs more veg, like maybe a can of diced tomatoes. It’s a lot like a chili in some ways, so I keep wanting to add tomatoes. I bet potato would be good in it too, if you wanted to make it more like a smoky potato & bean soup dish.

A bowl with a slice of cornbread & a dollop of vegenaise (for creaminess, instead of sour cream) came to under $2 and had these nutrients:

  • 580 kcal
  • 23 g fat
  • 60 g carbs
  • 23 g protein
  • 1.8 g fiber
  • Poojabber@lemmy.world
    19·
    20 days ago

    I hope this tasted great, but if I am being honest, the picture looks like aweful slop. Please tell me it was delicious so I can sleep happily.

    • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      7·
      20 days ago

      It was pretty delicious, very similar to chili - but I personally felt it would have been better if it were expanded a bit more, maybe small, cubed potatoes to help add starch (I maybe rinsed my beans too much after cooking), or better yet is to lean into its chili profile and use diced tomatoes.

      It was pretty tasty, though - despite the brown slop look.

      To be honest, the recipe is not impressive and not helping my biased perspective that “all” vegan recipes are terrible (i.e. most vegan recipes create terrible tasting dishes) - it really do be like that. When I was a strict vegan, I usually would lookup non-vegan recipes and then learn techniques to adapt them to be vegan. That was usually more successful than starting with a vegan recipe.

      I think the reason vegan recipes are so terrible might relate to how much overlap exists between vegan food culture and health food culture (like, going back at least over a century - e.g. checkout at the Grahamites of the 19th century), so there is kind of an inherent asceticism in vegan food culture on average, I find.

      (Just to be fair, notable exceptions to vegan asceticism I know of include SauceStache and Bryant Terry, both of whom seem invested in making food that actually tastes good. Even if the generalization holds in my experience, it’s not really all vegan recipes.)

      I had to add a lot of ingredients not in the recipe to make it suitably rich and tasty - like I added liquid smoke, some vegan Worcestershire sauce, white miso, mushroom seasoning powder, etc.

    • fujiwood@lemmy.world
      3·
      20 days ago

      My guess, by the ingriedents, is that it tasted good. I imagine it tastes like savory pinto beans but if you want to try a more authentic recipe, search for Charro bean recipes.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    20 days ago

    I’m not sure jumping through hoops to poorly replace pork would be as good as just leaving it out, but it’s a damn nice effort for those that want it :)

    For me, if I’m doing pintos, the smoked paprika alone does everything I would use a pork product for except maybe the fats. Since I find using oils just as good as pork fats for this application, the only thing left is texture, and I’m fine with just the beans for that tbh.

    Again though, that’s me going on a tangent about personal preferences, and the recipe and work behind it are fucking great :)

    • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      2·
      20 days ago

      personally the texture and nutrition are major reasons to substitute pork with something like TVP.

      I really hate the way TVP tastes generally, it has this chalky off taste that I don’t know how to get rid of. So this time, determined to eliminate that weird taste, I rinsed the TVP thoroughly in hot water, then boiled it in a separate pot with black pepper, no-steak better-than-bouillon, vegan Worcestershire sauce, etc. and then drained it again before putting it with the onions to fry it up a little bit.

      The TVP dramatically increases the protein per serving, it would have been probably 10 g or less in a bowl / serving without the TVP, and then it wouldn’t have seemed like chili at all - just a thin bean soup. I try to aim to have around 20 g protein per 500 kcal meal, and it’s even more important when vegan to pay attention to the protein content.

      The reason I want protein is mostly for energy and satisfaction reasons - I’m less hungry when I eat more protein, and I notice I have more energy, which is important for supporting healthy habits like exercise (besides generally making life easier, as fatigue makes getting your tasks and work done more of a drag).

      Also, adding the TVP didn’t feel like too much of a hassle tbh - it was certainly easier to prep than cooking dry beans for hours, and having to do that prep a whole day in advance.

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        19 days ago

        Fair enough :)

        In all honesty, the folks I used to cook vegan for aren’t as big a part of my life as they used to be, so I’ve fallen out of the habit of directly supplementing protein since I eat meat to some degree or another a few times a week. I can do fine with a big ol pot o beans and some veggies the rest of the time. Since I don’t tend to miss the texture for the same reason, I didn’t even think about it being a big factor for anyone that would be using this recipe to begin with. That’s what I get for not thinking outside of myself lol.

        For real though, it’s great that you put the extra effort in and posted it. Seems like a really solid recipe

    • KittenBiscuits@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      18 days ago

      A lot of Appalachians know that as soup beans. I like to crumble my cornbread up in it to soak up the soup (old-fashioned cornbread is necessary here as sweet cornbread clashes horribly with the beans&taters, and I do love me some sweet cornbread much to my family’s disgust lol). I prefer navy beans to pinto, but a mix is also just fine. Skillet fry some sliced potatoes until kinda but not seriously stuck on and that’s the meal of choice that I request when I go home.

      Fun fact: it is served in the Senate office building cafeteria as “Senate bean soup” because a WV senator once upon a time wanted it for lunch every day and had the cafeteria start offering it. I got a good laugh (and a good lunch). Made me think it could be partly to blame for all the windbags in Congress. 🤣

      • SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world
        2·
        16 days ago

        My X’s family were from bad-side Indianapolis not Appalachia, but they sure made this one a lot. No seasoning, no nothing but beans and water. You should see what they call chili, or not.